Preheat your oven to 180ºC and line 3 muffin tins with cupcake cases. If you don’t have 3 trays, you can make them one colour at a time, remembering to wash and dry the tray after each round.

Each of these cupcakes starts with the same basic recipe:

Mix together the butter and caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, and sieve in the flour. Add the milk and stir until the mixture is smooth and consistent.

For the white cupcake, stir in the lemon zest until it’s evenly spread throughout the mixture. Split the mixture between the cupcake cases.

For the pink cupcake, sieve in the cocoa powder after adding the flour. Fill each cupcake case half full with the mixture, then place a square of chocolate and a raspberry in the middle of each before pouring the remaining mixture on top.

For the red cupcake, add in the vanilla essence before dividing the mixture between the cases.

All of the cakes should be baked for 15-18 minutes at 180ºC. Remember to use the knife test to check before removing them from the oven. If you don’t have room in the oven for all 3 colours at once or are only using 1 muffin tray, place them in the centre of the oven to bake.

When the cakes are done, remove them from the oven and leave them to cool.

Set a timer so that you don’t lose track of time, and then you can start making the icings. Again, the icing for each different cake starts with the same basic recipe:

Beat butter until soft. Sieve in the icing sugar and mix together until the buttercream is pale and forms stiff peaks. As you’re going to be piping and you want the design to hold it’s shape, continue beating the mixture until it’s stiff and holds its shape well.

For the white icing, stir in the lemon juice and beat thoroughly.

For the pink icing, add in the raspberries and beat thoroughly. The mixture should turn a light pink colour.

For the red icing, add in the red food dye or colouring, following the instructions as to how much to use. The icing should turn a bright red colour.

Leave the icing to cool in the fridge briefly whilst you’re waiting for the cakes to cool.

Once the cakes are cool, you can start icing. Do make sure that the cakes are at room temperature before you begin, or else the icing will melt and start to run.

Use a piping bag with a cross-headed nozzle, preferable with one point being slightly longer than the others. Pipe small circular ‘petals’ in a clockwise direction, spiralling inwards to the centre.

Once the cakes are iced, leave them in the fridge to allow the icing to set fully.

One of the many Oxford traditions when it comes to exams is wearing a carnation to mark your progression through your exam period. You start with a white carnation for your first exam, then a pink carnation for all of your middle exams, and you finish with a red one to mark your final exam. It’s a popular tradition in Oxford in May and June, and it’s rather lovely when you get congratulations on the street from people who see you wearing your red carnation.

Part of the tradition is that someone else has to buy your carnations for you, as its apparently bad luck to buy them for yourself. In some ways though, it’s just nice to find flowers in your pigeon hole when you’re otherwise surrounded by revision, even if those flowers do remind you of the upcoming ordeal.

In addition to the carnations, many people also give each other chocolate and sweets as kind little gestures around this time. To those of you worrying about the state of pre-exam nutrition, most colleges also offer a Fruit for Finalists scheme, where you can also get fruit rather than living off a diet of Dairy Milk and Lindt. I particularly like this culture of giving and gestures of goodwill around the time of exams, so I came up with these carnation cupcakes as a way to combine both aspects.

When it came to posting the cakes to various people’s pigeon holes, I put each set into resealable airtight sandwich bags to stop them from drying out, and I wrote a little note, wishing them good luck for their exams and explaining what the flavours were in each cake.

Naturally of course, I couldn’t just do vanilla cupcakes with different coloured icing on top, so I decided to have different flavours for each cupcake. I’ve always been a fan of lemon flavours in cake, and it also lent itself well to keeping the colour a light creamy white, so I went with that the for the first one.

As I’ve mentioned in my melt-in-the-middle chocolate and raspberry cupcakes, I really liked the concept as a cake in itself, and using the raspberries helped not only to create a contrast with the dark chocolate and lighten the taste, but also to create a naturally pink icing for the cake. I also liked the added ‘middleness’ of the cake, in that there was a nice surprise in the middle with the melted chocolate and raspberry as an extra boost, as well as it being the middle cake and carnation of the three. I decided to keep the final cupcake simple, sticking with a reliable vanilla cupcake, and using food dye to achieve the red colour.

Another advantage of using vanilla for the last one is that it would last better than the other two cakes, as there wasn’t any fresh fruit in the cake. As someone who had to have 2 pink carnation flowers to last them through the exam period in first year because the first one was in danger of withering before I reached the final exam, I was aware that exams can end up being spread over some time, and I wanted people to still have the option of eating each cake as they donned the matching coloured carnation.

For those of you who may be wondering what I did about my own carnations and arguably more importantly, my exams, I thankfully didn’t have any. At undergraduate level, the arts subjects only have exams at the end of the first year and at the end of the final year, so I spent last term as I did any other: writing essays, doing translations, and reading. However, many of my friends had exams, whether they were 2nd year science subject exams, first year Prelims or fourth year linguist Finals, so I spent a lot of last term baking these too!

Beat in the eggs to create a smooth mixture before adding in the sour cream, milk and vanilla extract.

Sieve in the flour and baking powder and mix until smooth and consistent. The mixture should be slightly more runny than a normal cake mixture.

Divide up the mixture between the three greased tins and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the cake passes the knife test.

Whilst the cakes are baking, you can make up the filling:

Lightly mash half of the raspberries in a bowl and then combine with the raspberry jam. Stir gently to ensure an even spread.

For the icing:

Start beating your double cream until it starts to thicken.

Add in the icing sugar and vanilla extract and continue to beat until the cream starts to form stiff peaks.

Once the cakes have finished cooking, remove them from the oven and leave them to cool.

When they’re ready, first ensure that they are all flat, using a serrated knife if necessary to trim the tops if they have domed.

To assemble the cake, take the bottom layer and spread a layer of the icing over it. On the bottom of the next layer, spread the raspberry filling and carefully place this on top of the bottom layer. Repeat with the next layer.

Once you’ve got all three layers together, spread the remaining icing over the top and sides of the cake, using a palette knife to give smooth and even coverage.

Prior to making this, Ele and I had spent the day at the Worcester College Garden Party, celebrating the fast-approaching end of term in elegant British style. The garden party was a lovely affair; we were greeted with glasses of champagne upon our arrival, and there was also a wonderful array of sandwiches and miniature desserts of various kinds for us to try. As a result, our main source of nutrition turned out to be strawberries and cream and ice cream in various flavours from the local Oxford ice cream parlour G&Ds. There was live music and dancing, giant garden-sized games of Jenga as well as limbo, and plenty of conversation as students emerged from the libraries, remembering the joys of friendship and trying to forget about the fast-approaching exams.

Having enjoyed the champagne, and later on several glasses of Pimm’s and Elderflower Collins, we were a little light-headed as we walked back to Ele’s afterwards. On the walk we decided that having something to eat might be a good idea, and so naturally a summery cake seemed like a rather good idea.

Like the melt-in-the-middle chocolate and raspberry cupcakes, this too was born out of a need to use up some raspberries, and the concept of mixing fresh raspberries with jam turned out to add a nice extra texture to the cake. It also helped to balance out the flavours with the cream frosting, so that despite the considerable amount of cream, it’s actually a rather light cake and tasted wonderful.

When chatting to Becky, one of my closest friends, a couple of months ago, we realised that despite having spoken about our respective baking endeavours on many an occasion, we’d never actually baked together. We’d shared ideas, recipes and tips, but we figured it was about time that we made something together rather than just talk about it. Given that I’m now out of the country on my Year Abroad, and I’m not going to be spending much time in the UK for the next 12 months or so, we settled on a date.

And so we baked. We’d spent some time deliberating over what we wanted to make, eventually settling on éclairs because Becky had never worked with choux pastry before, and I wanted to have a go at éclairs! (Plus they’d be easier to divide up afterwards.)

We did the usual things one does when baking: getting flour all over the hob, coating the walls in icing sugar, eating any remaining mixture that was sadly left unused at the bottom of the bowls… (I see you with your judging eyes, don’t pretend you don’t do it too.) We even ended up making a bit too much of the coffee cream filling, so once we’d finished baking, we treated ourselves to some chocolate-infused coffee with the leftover cream added for good measure and an éclair each.

I particularly enjoyed baking with Becky, because it sort of brought things full circle for me. She and another good friend from home, Charlotte, were the ones who about this time last year kept telling me to watch The Great British Bake Off until I finally caved into the pressure and agreed to watch the first episode of the new series. Looking back, I’m very glad I did. Since then, I’ve become hooked on the show and been inspired to start baking, much to the delight of my family and friends. One year later, and here I am!

My girlfriend, Ele, is another avid baker, so when she ended up getting a lot of raspberries on offer at the end of the market one day, using them to make some form of cake seemed the most logical thing for us to do.

One of my flatmates from last year, Jennifer, regularly made melt-in-the-middle chocolate muffins during term, so naturally I was eager to try the idea too.

The result of these two ideas was therefore what you see here: melt-in-the-middle chocolate cupcakes with a hearty topping of raspberry buttercream icing. I was so taken by it, in fact, that I ended up using the idea for my Carnation cupcakes.

Normally I bake for an occasion, or at least I find an occasion to bake a certain recipe that I want to try, but that wasn’t really the case here. Instead, this was baking for necessity, in order to try and use up some of the raspberries quickly. It did prove useful in that I got to have a go at making melt-in-the-middle cupcakes and get an idea for the kind of consistency I wanted, but even so, there wasn’t a particular occasion that the cakes were intended for. As you’d expect though, we weren’t short of people to help us eat them.

They say that money can’t buy you happiness, but money can buy ingredients with which you can bake. If baking doesn’t make you happy, then I’m not sure what will. One of my main plans for meeting new people and making new friends when I’m on my Year Abroad next year is genuinely to bake and bribe people into being my friends through the use of baked goods. You may laugh at me from your moral high ground, but when the cakes come out of the oven and are just sitting ready on the side, there are few who can resist. Me included.

All the ingredients, ready to go! (I was also making religieuses and brownies on the same day, hence the obscene number of eggs amongst other things.)

Pull up a chair and put the kettle on; we’re in for a long ride. With a combined baking time of 3 hours, plus time for preparing the mixture and icing the finished cake, you’re going to be in the kitchen for a while…

As the seemingly never-ending list of ingredients suggests, this is probably the most complex thing I’ve baked so far. Essentially, it’s three layers of cake, covered with fondant icing. To help you along the way, I took photos of the various things so that you should have an idea of how your baking should look before you get to the end.

A few words of warning before you begin: for this recipe, you’re going to need 3 hemisphere tins or pyrex bowls of different sizes, such that you can fit one inside the other to get the layered effect. The structure of this cake works by baking each layer into the next one, thereby removing the need for any form of adhesive to hold the whole cake together.

To try and make things a bit easier, I altered the recipe for each cake so that all was required was making up the same basic cake recipe and then adding the flavour as appropriate. Feel free to change the flavourings, but bear in mind that you want the inner layer to have a more runny texture initially, as it’ll be baked 3 times in total. If you do change the type of cake you’re using, then the baking times may also be different. In case you’re unsure about whether a layer is baked, leave it in for a little longer. In this case, it’s far better to have a slightly over-baked cake, as you’ll have to trim the layers, but once you remove the cake from the oven, it stops baking and putting it back in may not be enough to save it. The best thing I can recommend with this is to keep a close eye on the oven as you near the end of the recommended baking time to see when it’s done.

Recipe:

Start by preheating your oven to 160ºC, and grease the smallest bowl or tin.

Cream together the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until the mixture is pale and stiff.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, until the texture is smooth, and then sieve in the flour.

Pour in the milk and mix.

Add in the vanilla essence.

Transfer the mixture into your greased smallest bowl or tin and bake for about 45 minutes.

The first layer pre-oven baking.

While that’s baking, you can get started on the next layer, but bear in mind that you have to wait for the first layer to have finished baking and cooled before you can put the next one in the oven.

You can make up the next layers when the first is baking and put them in the fridge to cool whilst you’re waiting.

As before, cream together the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until the mixture is pale and stiff.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, until the texture is smooth, and then sieve in the flour.

Pour in the milk and mix.

Add in the lemon zest and beat to ensure an even distribution throughout the mixture.

Transfer the mixture to the your greased middle-sized bowl or tin.

Once the first layer is baked, remove it from the bowl and leave it to cool. When it’s cool enough to the touch, check that the bottom is round and unbroken, using a sharp knife to shape it if needs be.

Once it’s smooth, press it into the centre of your middle layer mixture, and bake for 60 minutes.

The second layer, with the first already-baked layer in it.

The first two layers cooling upside down. The inner layer will rise as the next layer bakes, but you can make it even at the end.

The next thing to do is make the final, outer layer of cake:

As you’ll probably have gathered by now, follow the same plan as before: cream together the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until the mixture is pale and stiff.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, until the texture is smooth, and then sieve in the flour.

Sieve in the cocoa powder, and then pour in the milk and mix.

Add in the orange zest and beat to ensure an even distribution throughout the mixture.

Transfer the mixture to the your greased largest bowl or tin.

Once the middle layer is baked, remove it from the bowl and leave it to cool. When it’s cool enough to the touch, check that the bottom is round and unbroken, using a sharp knife to shape it if needs be.

Once it’s smooth, press it into the centre of your outer layer mixture, and bake for 75 minutes.

When that’s finished, remove the cake from the oven and leave it to cool. You can now turn off the oven at last.

Once the cake is cool, use a sharp serrated knife, such as a bread knife, to flatten the top of your cake carefully. Turn the cake upside down so that the layers are facing down and unseen, and leave to one side.

All three layers of baked cake. As previously suggested, this does have a tendency to mushroom as each successive layer rises from beneath the previous cooked cake.

However, with the use of a sharp knife, you can create a flat base for your cake.

For the icing and assembly:

Dust a surface with icing sugar and, using a rolling pin, roll out your fondant icing.

Split the icing roughly in half, and put one half to one side for now.

To the remaining icing, apply your blue food dye or colouring. The quantities of this will depend on the substance you’re using. I used strong food dye, so a pea-sized amount was plenty to give the icing a bright colour. If in down, remember the mantra of all one-way processes such as baking and painting: less is best. You can always add more afterwards, but you can’t take out the colour once it’s mixed in.

You want your icing to have a bright and consistent colour, especially for the blue for the sea.

Roll out the icing again until you have a large circular piece of blue icing.

Your cake should now have completed cooled, so transfer the blue icing to it, draping it over the rolling pin to help carry it.

Make sure that the icing completely covers the cake on all sides with no tears, and use a sharp knife to trim the sides.

Apply the green food dye or colouring to your remaining icing, and roll it out.

Using a sharp knife, carve it into the shape of the landmass(es) of your choice. I would highly recommend having a map or image to work from here.

Once you’ve got your green icing cut to shape, apply it to the cake, being careful not to rip it in the process.

A finished slice. I appreciate that the inner layer is rather difficult to see, given that it’s almost the same colour as the middle layer, but I promise you, it was there!

As I mentioned earlier, it’s far better to risk over-baking the layers on this one. Unfortunately, I learnt that lesson the hard way… On the plus side, you can eat it like a pudding with custard, except that it’s with cake mix instead!

Be warned; this may look baked on the outside, but pyrex bowls are much slower to cook the inside of a cake than metal tins.

I saw this idea on the Internet somewhere quite some time ago and was immediately taken by it. One of my close friends and flatmates from last year, Kesia, studies Earth Sciences, so naturally my first thought when I saw this was to make it for her for some occasion. Unfortunately, her birthday is in August, so doing it as a birthday cake would have required considerable planning and organisation.

When I came across this recipe, I had only just started baking, and so I decided to leave it for when I had a bit more expertise in the kitchen and could make a decent attempt at such a complex cake! Thankfully, the two timing requirements came together in the form of a post-exams celebration for Kesia, as she had exams at the end of last year, whereas, being a languages student at Oxford, I didn’t, so I had more time to focus on baking rather than revising.

I had mentioned to Kesia that it would be good to have some sort of celebration for her at the end of her exam period, especially as she was going to miss the last night of term because of a field trip. I’d said that I’d make something for the occasion, so she was expecting baking of some kind, but I’d managed to keep the idea itself a secret from her until it was unveiled.

I decided to do a map of Europe for a couple of reasons: firstly, because it would be fairly easy and hopefully recognisable, despite my less than gallery-worthy art skills. I also decided to go with a European theme, because it was the last day that Kesia was going to be in Oxford with Tess (another close friend and flatmate) and I before we went left for our Year Abroad next year.

I did also make brownies for the celebration, and so as a joke, I presented her with those initially, claiming that they were like a tray of soil, but baked. Being the wonderfully kind person she is, she was very grateful, so I did have to say that I was in fact joking, and then brought out the main cake. Few words were exchanged and many were speechless, but the noises of appreciation and amazement as we were cutting and eating the cake seemed to be a sign of positive feedback!

Preheat the oven to 220ºC. On a piece of baking paper, draw eight circles 5cm wide and eight circles 2.5cm wide, and use it to line a baking tray

In a saucepan, heat the butter and water together over a medium heat until the butter melts. Bring the mixture to the boil before immediately removing from the heat.

Add in the flour when you take the mixture off the heat and stir vigorously and continuously with a wooden spoon until it forms a soft ball. Cook over a low heat for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Remove from the heat once more and leave the mixture to cool. Add the eggs, beating each one in fully before adding the next, to create a shiny and smooth paste.

Spoon the mixture into a piping bag with a 1.5cm nozzle and pipe round discs onto the baking tray in the marked circle. Dampen your finger and gentle smoothen the top of each disc.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 10 minutes at 220ºC, then reduce the temperature to 190ºC and bake for a further 10-15 minutes. Remove the choux pastry buns from the oven and pierce each with a skewer to allow the steam and heat to escape. Turn the oven off and put the choux buns back in for 4-5 minutes to dry. Remove once more from the oven and leave them to cool.

For the crème pâtissière:

Add the milk and vanilla seeds to a saucepan and gradually bring to the boil. Once the mixture has started to boil, remove from the heat and leave it to cool for 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks and caster sugar together until pale, then add in the cornflour and plain flour to the mixture. Combine with the vanilla-flavoured milk and whisk continuously.

Bring the mixture back to the boil over a medium heat whilst continuing to whisk and cook for 1 minute.

Pour the crème pâtissière into a bowl and cover it with cling film, as doing so will prevent it from forming a skin. Put the bowl in the fridge to cool.

For the chocolate ganache icing:

Bring the double to a boil in small pan, and then remove from the heat.

Add in the chocolate and stir consistently until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is shiny.

Transfer the mixture to a bowl and leave in the fridge to cool until the ganache is thick but still spreadable.

For the cream collar:

Whip the double cream in a bowl until peaks start to form.

To assemble the religieuse:

Spoon the crème pâtissière into a piping bag with a long thin nozzle, and use it to fill the buns.

With a teaspoon, gently spread the chocolate ganache over the top of each bun, using the ganache to help keep the smaller bun on top of the larger.

Spoon the cream for the collar into a piping bag with a star shaped nozzle. Pipe a collar of cream around the joining point between the two buns.

Now, I must be honest with you here and tell you that when I first tried to make these, my crème pâtissière really didn’t work as I’d hoped. As you can see, the mixture was far too thin, as the milk I was using had too high a water content and too low a fat content. I have since learnt the error of my ways. One of the things I also took from the experience was that with some things, no amount of whisking is going to make them thick enough to resemble cream in any form, and you’ll just end up with a vanilla-flavoured milk substance that refuses to change texture.

Please don’t tell Mary Berry!

I was first introduced to religieuses, as with many baked goods, through The Great British Bake Off, and I loved the concept. As a long-time lover of profiteroles, the idea of stacking them seemed like genius. I will admit, the fact that the name is French may have also been a contributing factor in my love for these delicacies, especially because of the wonderful attempts at pronouncing the name made by the various GBBO contestants and presenters.

The French name, for the finished good as well as the choux pastry and crème pâtissière, made this recipe a clear forerunner when it came to deciding what to bake for a French tea party. (Yes, French tea party. I’ll explain.) Once the words ‘tea party’ had been mentioned, I naturally felt an obligation to don my apron and bake something for the occasion. Hence the French connection to religieuses.

At the end of my second year studying French and German at Oxford, our French language tutor offered to host our final class in her flat nearby. Given that it was the end of the year and we were preparing to go off on our Years Abroad, our only task was to produce a hilariously bad translation of a pop song, which we then read to each other at said tea party. I appreciate that to those of you who don’t have much to do with translation this may not sound like the most fun experience ever, but when you’ve made some pretty creative but ultimately wrong word choices and produced horrific contortions of both English and French, laughing at deliberately bad attempts is somewhat therapeutic.

To aid in our therapy therefore, our tutor very kindly provided us with a miniature feast. She made brownies, banana cake and flapjack for us, so with the religieuses as well we were rather spoilt for choice! What these photos do lack sadly is some sense of perspective, but know that these nuns were rather large. Thankfully the other French students at my college came along at the end to help us out with the cornucopia we’d found ourselves with.

As always, start by preheating your oven to 180ºC, and grease two 10” cake tins.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.

Add in the eggs, one at a time, and sieve in the flour and baking powder. Normally you wouldn’t use baking powder if you’re already using self-raising flour, but here it helps the cake to rise that bit more and give it a particularly light texture.

Pour in 2 tbsp of milk and mix until smooth. Divide the mixture between the tins and bake for about 20 minutes until golden and the cake springs back when pressed, or until it passes the knife test.

Leave the cake to cool and make a start on the icing by beating the butter until smooth and soft.

Sieve in the icing sugar. My other recipes usually work with a ratio of 1:2 for butter to icing sugar, but here you don’t need something as stiff and strong as you would for decoration or holding a cake together.

Add the vanilla extract to the buttercream for extra taste and leave to cool in the fridge.

Once the cakes have cooled, take the bottom layer and spread a generous amount of strawberry jam over the top.

Next spread the chopped strawberries evenly over the strawberry jam, making sure that they don’t go over the sides.

Spread the buttercream over the bottom of the remaining layer and carefully place it over the strawberries.

For working with the fondant icing, dust a work surface with icing sugar just as you would use flour otherwise. Work the fondant icing sugar with your hands and then a rolling pin to make it more pliable until you have a large thin layer.

Carefully lift the fondant icing off the work surface, draping it over the rolling pin to help carry it. Lay it gently over the cake, making sure that there are no tears in the surface.

Using a sharp knife, gently neaten up the edges, using the natural shape of the icing to help guide any curves you want. It’s up to you how much of the side you show, but I think it’s nice to leave some gaps to make it look like the icing has been poured on and so that you can see the strawberries inside.

With the return of the Great British Bake Off to our screens, it seemed appropriate to write about this one. The recipe for this is very similar to my other Victoria sandwich recipe (see here), but presentation and structure are a little different, and the measurements vary too.

The first time I made this cake was for a college charity event, where we gathered in the common room to watch the final of the Great British Bake Off last year and there was a bake sale at the same time too. There was even a competition going for who could make the most money with their cake, where the winner would win the official Great British Bake Off cookbook. Sadly I ended up coming 2nd, losing out due to a limited quantity, even though I managed to sell out first. The event went really well and we managed to raise a lot for charity!

The state of the bake sale after half an hour… The GBBO Final hadn’t even started by this point.

The inspiration for this cake came from Series 4’s Glenn, who came up with the idea and the design of using whole strawberries and icing over the top. For the charity event it was suggested that we’d get bonus points for recreating one of the bakes from earlier in the series, so I naturally turned to cake and found Glenn’s recipe, which seemed elegant and yet not too complicated.

I also made this cake several months later for my friend Tess’ birthday. The only slight difference there was that I kept 2 small strawberries back at the end, and used them as decoration on the top of the icing. Unfortunately, I don’t think there was time between finishing it and presenting to her for me to get a photo without spoiling the surprise for her, so I don’t have a picture of that particular cake!

When I first made this, it was as I was just starting out with baking, so I can certainly recommend it as a fairly simple recipe that looks good and gets you into thinking about presentation as well.